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High-tech = high consumption. France 24’s Environment explores the environmental impact of contemporary digital culture, from energy consumption at data centres to ‘planned obsolescence’ and efforts to recycle dead hardware. Check it out after the jump:

No matter how much the European Commission wants the world to believe that Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) has a monopoly on search, at least in Europe, and how much software experts believe that its Android operating system has seized control of the smartphone OS universe, the huge American tech giant does demonstrate its self-proclaimed “goodness” ethical position from time to time.

Most recently, Google says it has protected its Gmail users from countless spam attacks and attempts by evil doers to seize the identities of account holders. It should make the balance of the world’s e-mail users want to migrate their service to Google.

The latest edition of the Google Official Blog points out:

To improve their chances of beating a spam filter by sending you spam from your contact’s account, the spammer first has to break into that account. This means many spammers are turning into account…

Recently I was talking with a friend about entrepreneurship and technology. The topic of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) came up and how it’s been a hot area for years now. After discussing it further, we agreed that SaaS is just getting started and shows no signs of slowing down.

Here are some of the reasons SaaS is so disruptive:

Pace of innovation is much faster for a tech company compared to installed software due to delivering software over the web

Ease of on-boarding a new client and getting value is a magnitude better than the previous way

Removal or lack of IT involvement empowers line-of-business managers to be more autonomous and self-sufficient

Anytime, anywhere access changes the approach to work and frees up team members to be productive on their own schedule

Open APIs to share data and connect systems in an automated fashion is 10x more efficient than traditional enterprise software